Rainy day reminisces…

She stopped typing on her computer and looked outside the window. The rain was silently, unobtrusively spattering the glass, spraying a thin film of water that ran down in relentless rivulets. The skies looked somber as if lost in thought while the horizon had lost the battle with the overhanging clouds.

This weather always affected her mood, for better or worse. She remembered being a lighthearted teenager looking out of the long French windows of her room, eager to capture those rain-drenched moments in a way that she knew best – through her writing. She would write about dewy leaves that shone with suspended joy perhaps encapsulating a whole new universe in a single water droplet. About the earth’s fragrance that emanated from the parched soil like a bedecked bride awaiting her lover. The way the breeze sprayed water on to her uplifted face like a much awaited kiss…

O how her ink-stained fingers never felt fatigue as she would capture the splendor of the rainy day in a mesh of words.

It had seemed magical then. A time when she had a lighter heart and a ready smile and the whole wide world seemed to lie at her young feet, promising an adventure at every step.

Now was a different time, a different story. Time had made her more “worldly”. She was learning to toe the line and live up to everyone’s expectations. She was after all, a ‘She’, wasn’t she? A woman – forever expected to bear the whims of the world with a smile. Show even a spark of individuality and the world is quick to raise a disdaining eyebrow.

The raindrops increased their tempo against the glass, echoing her heartbeats.

Sighing, she gazed into the distance. Tomorrow would be her birthday, her twenty-ninth year of existence, one year short of three decades. Almost half her life gone within the blink of an eye. She wasn’t exactly ecstatic as one should be before one’s birthday, or brimming with hope for the future as she had been in the past. It wasn’t that big a deal any more, she thought, just another obscure milestone marking her uneventful life.

Her husband would bring her a cake and she would dutifully cut a piece, feed it to him and nibble on a portion herself. In the middle of the night, there would be a few callers, mostly family, a few friends – the number getting lesser and lesser every year – to wish her on her special day. It would be the run-of-the-mill stuff. With time, birthdays become so mundane, predictable, annoying even. And the icing on the cake? You get older. (Wiser or not, is another matter altogether!) Nature gifts you grey hair, saggy skin, wrinkles, grouchy brow – now who wants that?

She tore her gaze away from the window and looked at her laptop screen in a bored, listless manner, wondering what the whole point of it all was anyway. It was just another day, to be treated like any other day. There will be sun and occasional rain. She will be lost in the maze of life, looking back once in a while when raindrops smacked the glass of her window.

But then sometimes, on those rare occasions, there are rainbows. May be they are just inverted smiles from another world, another time – harbingers of hope. However fleeting, they still surface like a surprise just when you have given up hope. It is this resilient hope that really counts in the end, right?